Design

If you know your Italian sports car history, you probably know that Lamborghini built farm tractors long before a falling out between Feruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari led to the creation of Lamborghini’s automobile business. In fact, Lamborghini’s tractor business began to take off...

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, it seemed like a future filled with flying cars was inevitable. Automotive designers and engineers weren’t afraid to push the boundaries of design, as evidenced by the gas turbine-powered Chrysler Turbine Car and the nuclear reactor-powered Ford Nucleon...

Each year Swiss design firm Rinspeed unveils a wacky concept at the Geneva Motor Show in order to demonstrate its talents and preview its take on the future of automotive design. Next year will be no different, with Rinspeed this week revealing its new microMAX concept car, with which it hopes to...

Porsche’s upcoming Macan compact crossover, due for a reveal late next year ahead of a sales launch in 2014, will adopt a bold new look the automaker has no qualms of admitting was inspired by the aggressive lines of the Range Rover Evoque. As our earlier spy shots revealed, the new Macan was...

In the future, highway patrol vehicles are likely to look a lot different from the police cruisers of today. This year's Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge asked automakers to sketch what the ideal highway patrol vehicle of 2025 might look like, and top honors go to Subaru for its SHARC design...

Automotive critics, it seems, are a hard bunch to please. We look at things in a different light than most consumers, paying careful attention to details like the material used to cover a dashboard, or the quality of plastic used throughout the interior. While we’re quick to pan a car...

If all you know about Lincoln automobiles comes from what you’ve seen in its dealer showrooms over the past two decades, it would be easy to write the brand off as a pseudo-luxury automaker reselling badge-engineered Fords. The demise of the Mercury brand was supposed to clarify the line...

For its entry for the 2012 Los Angeles Auto Design Challenge, a contest that challenges the world’s top automotive designers to come up with the best concept car for a given theme, Mercedes-Benz developed the imposing Ener-G-Force SUV. However, rather than leave the vehicle just as a design...

Now that luxury automaker Infiniti is a title sponsor of Red Bull Racing’s Formula One efforts, it makes perfect sense that the two will combine talents to produce a high-performance street car. Sure, Infiniti has already built the Sebastian Vettel Edition FX50, but that only left us...

Every year, the Los Angeles Auto Show offers up its Design Challenge, meant to give attendees a look into the world of automotive design. Last year, the theme was “Hollywood’s Hottest New Movie Car,” and the award went to designers from Smart. This year’s theme was the...

At January’s 2013 Detroit Auto Show, Mercedes-Benz will unveil its updated 2014 E Class range, which once again will include a high-performance E63 AMG variant. The reveal of the new E63 AMG, in particular, is very important as this will be the first time that we’ll be seeing the bold...

Part of Ferrari’s appeal as a supercar is that each model can be highly personalized to an individual customer’s preferences. For some, contrasting leather upholstery and a bit of carbon fiber trim is enough; for others, however, a complete redesign of an existing model is the only...

In September, we told you that BMW was partnering with automotive crowdsourcing expert Local Motors for an urban automotive technology design contest. The idea was simple: use Local Motors’ Forge community to address challenges faced by urban drivers in the coming years. As The Forge has...

To celebrate the lifelong contribution of Sergio Pininfarina, who passed away earlier this year at age 85, Ferrari is running an exhibition dedicated to the late designer at its museum in Maranello, Italy. The exhibition features examples of most of Pininfarina’s creations for the Prancing...

Audi is addressing the claim that its cars all look the same by taking its design in a bold new direction. The automaker plans to introduce greater differentiation between each of its model lines, with its future styling expected to reflect in greater detail the technical aspects behind the cars...

Jaguar is following Mercedes-Benz’s lead of expanding its design talents into other fields, by designing a new speedboat concept inspired by the svelte lines of its XF Sportbrake model sold overseas. According to Jaguar design boss Ian Callum, who was in charge of the project, the speedboat...

This past weekend one of the greatest collections of Ferraris, including both concept cars and production models, went on show at the official Ferrari Museum in Maranello, Italy. The cars are being shown in the Greatest Ferraris Of Sergio Pininfarina exhibition, which honors the legendary designer...

As Europe’s automakers continue to see their sales increase in key markets like the U.S. and China, while back home sales either remain flat or are on the decline, it’s natural that going into future car design will better reflect the desires of consumers where a bulk of sales are made...

Nissan has revealed a new sports concept it plans to unveil later this week at the 2012 Sao Paulo Auto Show. The concept, which combines elements from a sports car with those of a crossover, is called the Extrem and was designed by a team at Nissan Design America in San Diego, California. The...

Lincoln, believe it or not, used to be a design powerhouse. Remember the Mark II of the late 1950s? Of course. How about the Lincoln Continental of the 1960s? Sure you do. But the problem is what it turned into. When the Town Car, once the top trim of the Continental, rose to glory, it did it on...